Posts Tagged ‘Irenaeus’

Two days ago (March 30, 2017) I responded to a short article by Mormon blogger Robert Boylan in which he and his non-Mormon friend Errol Vincent Amey claimed I had quoted Irenaeus out of context. They have now responded in another piece on Boylan’s blog entitled “Bowman shoots…and misses on sola scriptura.” In what follows, I will sometimes refer to Amey and sometimes to Boylan, but it appears that for all intents and purposes Boylan’s post speaks for both of them.

In my article, I stated repeatedly that Irenaeus did not hold to the evangelical Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, but only that his position was far closer to sola scriptura than to the positions represented by Amey and Boylan: Read the rest of this entry »

In a Facebook exchange on March 25, 2017, in the group “B.C. and L.D.S. (Biblical Christians and Latter Day Saints)” with a non-Mormon named Errol Vincent Amey, I presented a series of quotations from the church fathers to counter Mr. Amey’s view of Scripture and authority. In brief, Mr. Amey is a follower of David Bercot, who teaches that true Christianity (which just happens in Bercot’s view to correspond to a modern form of Anabaptist Christianity) is to be determined solely on the basis of the consensus teachings of the ante-Nicene church fathers (i.e., the church fathers who wrote prior to the Council of Nicaea in AD 325). Mr. Amey ignored all but one of the quotations, my quotation of Irenaeus in Against Heresies 3.2.1, which he attempted to counter by quoting the next paragraph as well as a later passage (3.2.2; 3.4.1).

The next day, Mr. Amey’s friend Robert Boylan, a Mormon blogger, posted a critique of what he called my “abuse of Irenaeus of Lyons to support sola scriptura.” Mr. Boylan approvingly repeated Mr. Amey’s argument, again mentioning only my one quotation of Against Heresies 3.2.1 and answering it by quoting 3.2.2 and 3.4.1.

Anabaptists and Mormons make somewhat strange bedfellows, though of course they do share some agreements. Both are modern forms of restorationism, which seeks to re-establish the primitive Christianity that was supposedly lost in a massive apostasy that corrupted virtually all of Christianity for well over a millennium. Yet they have radically different views about what a restored Christianity should look like. The one thing on which they agree is that it would not look at all like traditional evangelical Protestantism. It is apparently this point of agreement that unites such persons as Mr. Amey and Mr. Boylan.

Mr. Boylan’s blog post knocks down a straw man of his own creation. I did not claim that Irenaeus held to the evangelical Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. Read the rest of this entry »